Taki Taki

High life | 31 January 2013

issue 02 February 2013

Good for you, Clive, as in James, on your television criticism for the Telegraph. Not many people nowadays know how good a painter Gerald Murphy was. Richard E. Grant pointed this out in his programme The Riviera: A History in Pictures, and Clive praised him for it. Clive James is weak on health but very strong on intellect, and it’s good to read him and his pithy remarks in a paper of value.

Gerald Murphy was the model for Dick Diver in Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night. He was the owner of Mark Cross, a luxury goods store on 5th Avenue, back when luxury goods were beautiful and owned by people with good taste. Gerald and Sara Murphy invented the summer Riviera of the Twenties. Their villa America near Antibes was the social centre for expatriate American writers, musicians and artists. Sara was blonde and beautiful and supposedly had an affair with Picasso.

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